Researchers at Wordfence found that attackers compromised the upstream infrastructure of BdThemes, a popular WordPress plugin vendor, and poisoned a remote JSON feed that its plugins fetch to show promotional banners in the admin dashboard. Because the malicious code lives in that feed rather than in the plugin source, no plugin update was needed and nothing changed on disk. The injected script runs in every logged-in administrator's browser, creates hidden rogue admin accounts through the site's own interface, and installs a fake plugin containing a web shell for persistence. Seven plugins including Element Pack and Prime Slider were affected, and the flaw sat unnoticed for about five months.
A cybercrime group left its own server exposed on the internet for weeks, revealing a mass website-hacking operation that researchers at SOCRadar now track as WP-SHELLSTORM. The crew breaks into sites at scale, plants hidden backdoors, and resells the access to other criminals. Rather than using zero-days, it automated attacks against 27 known vulnerabilities in outdated WordPress and Joomla plugins; a single flaw in the Breeze caching plugin accounted for over 17,000 backdoored sites. Target lists named more than 1.4 million domains, with roughly 25,000 confirmed compromised. The same server also revealed an earlier campaign that stole cloud credentials and database passwords from exposed configuration servers.
TrustStrike Labs